DISA embraces new role as DoD's sole provider of big data centers

Jared Serbu reports.

The Defense Department is just beginning a huge project designed to move a massive
chunk of the military's widely-dispersed and widely-varied stateside computing
capacity into a relative handful of mega data centers across the country. It's a
project the Pentagon plans to finish within five years.

A July memo from DoD's chief information officer designated the Defense
Information Systems Agency as the one and only provider of "core data centers"
(CDCs). There are, for now, eight such centers, all of which are preexisting
Defense Enterprise Computing Centers (DECCs) operated by DISA.

The intent, officials say, is to remove as much IT as possible from individual
military posts around the continental U.S. and migrate it into a central cloud structure
that's easier to supervise, secure and maintain.

"There is a big effort underway right now to look at all the computing that is out
there in the services, and if it's a local requirement that's used on the
installation and not externally, it can go into what's called an installation
processing node — they'll have small capabilities with certain limitations,"
said Dave Bennett, who wears two hats as DISA's chief information officer and its
director of enterprise services. "Other than that, the applications that are used
broadly or outside the installation, they're moving to a core data center. And
that's to be done by fiscal 2018."

Bennett, who spoke at the agency's recent forecast to industry, said the CDC plan
will serve as DoD's overall response to the Office of Management and Budget's
Federal Data Center Consolidation (FDCC) initiative and will form the backbone of
DoD's future Joint Information Environment.

Challenges to overcome

But to bring so much disparate IT under one virtual roof will require DISA to
cross some high hurdles: The centers will need to be highly secure, have virtually
no downtime, be able to send and receive massive amounts of data around the
country, and enforce a set of technology standards across the entire DoD
enterprise.

But standards, Bennett said, are a good thing.

"You can drive what the virtual operating environments are going to look like. You
can drive what the security architecture's going to look like. You can drive what
the communications architecture's going to look like," he said. "As an application
developer, you don't have to guess what the world's going to look like. You're
going to understand these things, and as we drive more and more to virtualized
environments, your rates will go down."

The Defense Department believes the core data center structure will let it
significantly shrink the number of dollars the military services and agencies are
using on wasted or underutilized IT infrastructure. In part, Bennett said, that's
because everything DISA runs in the CDCs, from storage to computing capacity to
bandwidth, will be paid for on a model that uses capacity services contracts with
vendors.

"We can scale up or scale down as the requirements drive us," he said. "If you
have a capability today that's supporting 10,000 users and tomorrow it needs to
support 50,000, we can very quickly turn that up as you need it. And as the demand
goes away, we can scale it back down so that I don't have to invest in buying
boxes that just sit on the floor. The contract provides it. I just tell the vendor
to fire up some more boxes or to scale it down. And then I don't have to worry
about sustaining that capability over the long term."

Lots of work still to be done

But with so many of the military's IT eggs in so few baskets, Bennett said the
centers will need to have gold-plated cybersecurity measures in place. They also
can't afford to let a center go dark because of a power outage or a technical
glitch.

"We're investing huge amounts of money to make sure we have full redundancy
throughout those data centers," he said. "Power, HVAC, floor space, racks,
redundant power feeds and communications off of different nodes, it's all a highly
fault-tolerant environment. It's been a massive undertaking, and it's still going
on."

As of today, Bennett acknowledges DISA still has some work to do when it comes to
being able to respond to requests for service from the military services in a
rapid fashion. But going forward, he said delivering capability quickly will
depend a lot on defense components' willingness to adhere to the standardized technology the core data centers will
run on.